Anna (Ganna) Malinovskaya
Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Economics & Management at the SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University
My fields of specialization are Public Economics and Applied Econometrics. I am particularly interested in using microdata and robust quasi-experimental research designs to study how public policy in the US can better serve low-income and marginalized populations, especially how interactions among public policies can directly or indirectly help facilitate human capital accumulation for such populations.
In my job market paper, I am using multiple quasi-experimental research designs to study not only whether the effects of exposure to a large-scale public program (WIC) in childhood persist through adulthood, but also whether exposure to multiple public programs, even from different domains (for example, a nutritional intervention early in life followed by an educational intervention later in childhood) can lead to “multiplier” effects - that is, when the combined positive effect of exposure to the two programs is larger than the sum of the effects of exposure to each of the two programs on their own. I believe that this newly gained knowledge could shift public policy thinking in the US in a new direction by encouraging policy makers to think about various public policies as elements of a single whole rather than disjoint pieces. By treating different public programs as elements of a single whole, policy makers could then work on making various public programs fit together better, in order to maximize human capital accumulation effects not of any particular public program, but of the entire package of all relevant policies and public policy as a whole.